The outstanding feature of that tour has been, once again, discursive radicalization. On his first trip to Spain since assuming power, the Argentine president joined the Vox campaign for the imminent European elections, stirring up the phobia of a sector of Spanish society towards socialism, understood as a label applicable to any political current. that does not sacralize individualism and the market, which allows the definition to be stretched until it traps Peronism within it. Milei described this orientation as “carcinogenic”, identified it with death and ruled that it is contrary to human nature.
It would be inappropriate to discuss the conceptual rigor of this classification. Because it is not designed to describe or explain a phenomenon, but to unleash an emotion. It is about stirring up hatred because it is assumed that, as Giuliano Da Empoli analyzed in his excellent book Chaos Engineersanger mobilizes and groups much more than any program.
Milei went further. She earned a very desirable space in all Spanish news portals by embodying these miseries in the President of the Government. He said that Pedro Sánchez was screwed to power and put his finger on the sore point, referring to the alleged corruption of his wife, Begoña Gómez, whom Justice is investigating for alleged influence peddling. Milei feels justified in this accusation, because two weeks ago the Minister of Transportation, Óscar Puente, accused him of using prohibited substances.
This furious exacerbation of the messages is associated with another characteristic of the political struggle of these times. Leaders who use this style, populists from the left or the right, prefer to act as leaders of a faction, rather than as heads of state. Milei defined himself before the Vox faithful as a “disseminator of the ideas of freedom” who, in addition and in a secondary way, exercises the Presidency of a country.
It is common for the leader of La Libertad Avanza to present himself as a prophet who assumes the mission of preaching a creed on a global scale. That is to say, he feels like the crusader of a “cultural battle.” This task has given him extraordinary popularity, which would be very difficult to achieve if his message were reduced to the routine tasks and problems of an administrator. His trip, then, was not conceived as a movement of Argentine foreign policy, but as a commitment to an international ideological brotherhood that gives him projection outside his country.
This practice is becoming more and more common. The same Vox convention was the setting for the Italian Giorgia Meloni or the Hungarian Viktor Orban to suspend for a moment their status as public officials to present themselves as co-religionists of Santiago Abascal. A bid to establish that “populist international” proposed by Donald Trump’s former guru, Steve Bannon. Milei only took this attitude to the extreme, because she was not enough to hug his friend, she also threw darts at Sánchez.
From this behavior another characteristic of the game unfolds: a loss of institutional meaning bordering on administrative irregularity. Milei was reminded by Carlos Rodríguez, an ultra-liberal Argentine economist, who collaborated with him during the electoral campaign. The Argentine president said that he was a liberal in a country of “lefties.” And Rodríguez commented: “Those lefties, 50% poor and indigent, paid for his trip on the presidential plane so that he could go talk nonsense.”
Rodríguez was referring to the fact that Milei and his entourage’s trip to Spain was paid for with State money, that is, with resources from taxpayers who, in many cases, sympathize with the socialism that he went to denigrate.
It is possible that Sánchez privately appreciated Milei’s attacks. In the midst of his proselytizing efforts, he allows him to polarize public opinion with a recurring argument: we are victims of the attack of the extreme right, which hates everything that Spaniards value, starting with social solidarity. At one end would be the PSOE and at the other, powered by Milei, Vox. And nothing more. Abascal also celebrates, who thanks to this conflict can fantasize about regaining air in a trajectory that had been declining.
The strategies of Sánchez and Abascal are very appropriate to a permanent objective: to disguise the existence of the Popular Party, which has a much greater electoral flow than Vox can drag. Sánchez and Milei contribute with their pugilism to the same operation: sinking the center.
There is another symmetry. Milei is a president who attacks like the leader of a tribe. Sánchez is attacked as a tribe leader but responds as president. This Sunday, the one who responded to the grievances was not the PSOE spokesperson but the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, who protested that Milei had attacked, not socialism, Sánchez and his wife, but “our democracy, our institutions and to Spain.” Albares reported that he had decided to call the Spanish ambassador in Buenos Aires, María Jesús Alonso Jiménez, for consultation, who, convalescing from surgery, must embark on a trip to Madrid. The call for consultation is the prior instance to the withdrawal of the ambassador, that is, to the breaking of diplomatic relations.
Sánchez managed to give more depth to this institutional reaction when the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Relations, the Spanish socialist Josep Borrell, published a statement saying that “attacks against relatives of political leaders have no place in our culture.”
Aware of the damage that this institutional victimization of socialism has for its electoral perspective, the Popular Party issued a statement stating that it did not have to endorse Sánchez’s position, because the person attacked was not Spain and its institutions but the wife of the leader of a political party. The spokesperson for the popular parties, Esteban González Pons, criticized the fact that ambassador Alonso Jiménez had been called for consultation. But he also reproached Milei for having interfered in Spain’s internal affairs. Difficult balance, which Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo broke. In a distance from the bureaucracy of her party, she issued this message: “The Government of Spain can call the president of Argentina a drug addict and the president of the Community of Madrid and her brother, whom no court is investigating for corruption, corrupt. . But the president of Argentina cannot call the wife of the president of the Government of Spain, who is being investigated by a court for corruption, corrupt. “To another dog with that funnel.”
Chancellor Albares demanded that Milei apologize. Milei’s spokesperson replied that he does not expect him to do so. It is not surprising, because the Argentine president’s catilinaries are not outbursts. They are premeditated. Until now he has only retracted motivated by some specific interest. For example, when he had to arrange for his electoral rival Patricia Bullrich, whom he had beaten for months, to order a vote for him in the second electoral round.
That Milei does not notice, or does not consider, that his controversy entails general harm does not mean that this harm does not exist. She warned herself during her time in Madrid. On Saturday, at the residence of the Argentine ambassador, she received a group of representatives of Spanish companies. Without discrediting anyone, he drew attention, in addition to the fact that they were all men, the absence of emblematic figures of the business community in Spain, especially company owners.
It is possible that this lack was due to organizational deficiencies. But another reason can be suspected. When you read the reports of that interview in Madrid newspapers, the number of justifications offered by the attendees, all off the record, to explain their attendance is striking. It is very evident that today to approach Milei in Spain is to move away from the socialist government. That is why several companies have spoken out since Sunday, taking a cautious distance from the Argentine president.
Then another material damage of this factional diplomacy appears. Not only partisan adventures are financed with resources from all those who pay their taxes. Investment management is also hindered, which is always harmful, but even more so for a country with as many economic hardships as Argentina.
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